Continuing through May 20, 2018
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Beruit-based artist whose complex and visually engaging works engage with ideas around the passive act of listening. His installation is based on a prison in Damascus where over 13,000 people have been executed. Very few have been released, and from this group Abu Hamdan had the opportunity to work with the survivors to reconstruct the architecture of the prison via aural memories.
Ray Tracing is a digital visualization tool used in architecture to map sound using lines that represent the way a sound wave refracts within the structure. Using this means, Abu Hamdan presents an array of floor-based overhead projectors, each of which projects a black and white line drawing onto the walls of the vault shaped gallery. These graphical drawings represent the architecture of the prison as extrapolated from the survivors’ aural recollections. In addition to the overlapping projects, also included are fragments of projected text and a sound piece also derived from these interviews